Someone hit the wrong button…

… and we made it red for a reason. Mistakes are human, but sometimes even a tiny one can have big consequences. So people get a wrong badge, sometimes. Happens. It can have consequences on occasion. Some of that and related stories here.

[UK] Palsternakka

At some point in 2005, 5 pages with rare furniture appeared in UK catalogue. Menu named it ‘palsternakka’, it had the Rares catalogue header and it contained about anything considered really, really rare, plus christmas furniture. And it was there for about 5 minutes only. Now, palsternakka is the Finnish word for ‘parsnip’ (pastinaca, a carrot-like vegetable), and the text below header was just a paragraph of Lorem Ipsum. Was it a mistake ? It was said to be, but people that bought something could keep it afterwards, rare values dropped, that might just have been intention. At the Swiss hotel they had a winter where they re-released about anything, presumably with that intention too. Source: Habbo Ages.

[FR] Free tickets

France was the first to receive v9, but at that first day, the purchase of game tickets was accidentally made free, so you could get an unlimited amount. Lots of people got loads of them, some got them removed later, some not. A certain crew member *cough* Lau *cough* still has loads left, and it even resulted in a HABBO trophy from Norman, French hotel manager.

[UK] Which bag ?

This story is sorta random, yet explanitory. People win something, but get a different thing. This causes some rumour, when the different thing is a rare item. Any hotel has seen this numerous times. This date, UK staff member Disarno hosted a game of Snakes & Ladders. Game was won by ‘!x!Cherrydrops!x!’ and she was supposed to get a graphite sleeping bag, recently released. She instead received an army sleeping bag, not released. Instant richness, if left that way, confusion, complaints all around. That is, when not a Mod picked it up quickly after, and it ended up being replaced with correct color version (source: Habbox). This is the stuff staff laughs over at their morning coffee the day after (still sorta relieved ;).

[JP] Egghead

With version 11 asian clothes were introduced. All going nicely, but they forgot to test in Japanese hotel, something got lost in translation. When you tried the new clothes things got weird. Habbo’s from all over the world came to Japan to walk around with no hair and no eyes.

[CA] Wrong badge handout

Habbo Canada and Habbo USA do competitions together… staff only has to make the story once and prepare some stuff to make sure the competition runs on two Hotels. With the ‘Kappa Habbo Gamma’ competition this was the case. But instead of giving out the regular competition badges the Habbo staff gave out Habbo Staff badges, and they came with every right attached to being staff. So, soon the panic button had to be pressed because regular Habbo’s could do whatever they wanted, thus the Hotel closed. Habbo staff safety banned lots of accounts to undo the actions (e.g. stolen furniture). Rumour has it that people who had used their rights to do some moderation then, were banned afterwards.

[SE] Free bunny!

BozzaNova (former hotelmanager in Sweden) released the lovely white Bunny for -1 credits. Ofcourse, sometimes a bug occors resulting in somebody having -1 credits. But this time the price was -1 credit. This meant when you bought it, you were given a free credit plus the bunny. Imaginable, this was repeated by Habbo’s lots of times. It’s quite an impressive mistake considering the short amount of time she was hotelmanager. People were allowed to keep what they gained. And - not saying related (she also displayed loads of unreleased stuff, for instance) - BozzaNova was not hotel manager anymore 5 days later.

[DK] Wrong badge handout II

Instead of some planned nice Chinese New Year badges the Danish Staff accidentally gave out Gold Hobba badges. They did not come with any moderation rights though, so it was decided not to close the hotel. Staff just quickly posted an article about it and told it would be fixed overnight.

[NL] Zen

With Zen furniture popping up around the world, it was only a matter of time before they were released in the Dutch hotel. This friday it was, only a little bit too soon… At around 11.00, the Zen Rocks popped up in the ‘Country’ section. Habbo’s who noticed this, quickly bought these (5 rocks for 9 credits), and - clever as they were - started to sell them. Rumour has it, one Habbo received 15 HC Sofas for one (!) rock. But the fun didn’t last long. At 11.05, 5 minutes after they appeared, the rocks were taken from the catalogue. Later that day, the Zen section was officially released. Too bad for the Habbo’s who paid great amounts of furni for those rocks, as they were included too…

[UK] Bobba filter gone wrong…

A rather small ‘whoops!’-moment here. With the release of version 37, guidebots were introduced. As it usually goes with new things, they tend to go wrong, and the guidebots were no exception. When you asked the guidebots for ‘games’ or ‘falling furni’, this is what they answered: “(…) Falling furBobbames are marked with FF or Falling furni (…)”. Did you find the error there ? Let’s get this sentence right: “Falling furnigames are marked with FF or Falling furni”. Didn’t they test this feature enough, or are there just too many words in the Bobba filter? We’ll probably never know. The whoops was corrected a few days later, with the release of a new build. By the way: did you know there are a lot of words inside the Bobba filter ?